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New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section 2010/2011

September 20, 2010

The New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section Meetings are held at The Wenner-Gren Foundation, 470 Park Avenue South, 8th Floor, New York City 10016. All panels are preceded by a reception from 6-7 pm. Talks are from 7-9 pm. Both reception and panel discussion are free and open to the public but attendees must register beforehand by calling the NYAS meeting services at 212-298-8600.

Audience listening to an NYAS lecture at the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Painting of Paul Fejos in the background

October 25, 2010"American Dreams of Brazilian Racial Democracy: Is Race to Brazil as Class is to the United States?"Speakers: Sean T. Mitchell, Rutgers University, NewarkAbstract:In this paper I examine popular and scholarly conceptions of race and inequality in Brazil and the United States. I argue that popular conceptions of class in the United States and popular conceptions of race in Brazil depoliticize inequality in closely parallel ways. This parallel has mostly gone unremarked in the large literature comparing race and inequality in the two countries because most scholars take either US or Brazilian conceptions for granted in their comparisons.

I develop this argument partially on the basis of ethnographic data on the land conflicts between quilombola (slave and maroon descended) villagers and the hub of Brazil’s space program in Alcântara, in Brazil’s northern state of Maranhão. This conflict was conceptualized in class terms two decades ago; today it is increasingly conceptualized in ethnoracial terms. My analysis of the racialization of this conflict allows me to examine the changing ways in which the links between race, class, and social inequality are imagined by Brazilian elites and non-elites. I use the framework that I develop in this ethnographic analysis to compare a wide variety of literature and data on Brazil and the United States.

By contributing to and critiquing the comparative literature on Brazil and the United States, this paper also aims to help to push forward a comparative anthropology of inequality and political identification.

Sean T. Mitchell is assistant professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark. His ethnographic work focuses on social inequality, ethnicity, violence, governance, citizenship, and technoscience in contemporary Brazil and the United States.

December 6, 2010"Emancipation Landscapes and Public Space in Early New York"Speaker: Christopher N. Matthews, Hofstra UniversityAbstract: Histories of slavery and freedom in the northern United States present a counterpoint to mainstream stories that highlight the plantation South. While northern slavery remains not as pronounced, northern emancipation was still greeted with public fanfare and celebration. In parades and speeches, the formerly enslaved seized the urban New York landscape to assert their freedom in a highly visible public space. However, emancipation created other landscapes as well. These reflected an inward focus that came with the spatial and symbolic removal of labor from the white familial household. I argue, in fact, that public spaces used in the demands and expressions of freedom by African Americans and other marginalized people covered for a more subversive white-desired segregation of public from private, mirrored in the segregation of back from white and work from home. Northern emancipation, therefore, was only a partial freedom as it simply involved a shift in the basis of social distinction from legal status to the presumed and practiced capacity for civility, illustrated best in the creation of the home as a civilized private space distinct from the public worlds of work, race, class conflict, and poverty.

Abstract:This presentation explores the contextual, theoretical and practical challenges of forensic anthropology in three different contexts – local case work, national and international mass disasters, and international human rights investigations. Forensic anthropologists typically serve as consultants to local medical examiners and coroners, forensic pathologists, law enforcement and attorneys to address questions related to personal identity and trauma of skeletonized or incomplete human remains. An increasing number of forensic anthropologists also apply their expertise beyond local casework. Forensic anthropological skills are highly valued in mass disaster situations, including transportation accidents as well as terrorist acts, such as those of September 11, 2001. Forensic anthropologists also form an integral component of international teams who investigate human rights atrocities around the world. This work was formally initiated in 1984 by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). Forensic anthropologists and archaeologists locate, recover and identify bodies from mass graves and provide an objective analysis of the circumstances of death. One problem is that U.S.-based methods and standards of forensic practice do not always easily transfer to global contexts. However, human rights work affords much room for theoretical considerations, including the meaning of identity in the context of genocide and the political and social meanings of missing and dead bodies. Local case studies, the World Trade Center disaster and aviation accidents, and ongoing human rights work in Spain will illustrate the concepts and challenges discussed.

Abstract:This essay has three key themes: ontology (what kinds of beings there are in the world); affect (cognitive and corporal attunements to such entities); and selfhood (relatively reflexive centers of attunement). To explore these themes, it focuses on women’s care for chickens among speakers of Q’eqchi’-Maya living in the cloud-forests of highland Guatemala.

March 28, 2011 Panel : "A Radical Humanist. Franz Boas at the Centennial of The Mind of Primitive Man"Organizer: Neni Panourgia, Columbia University“Mind, Body, and the Native Point of View in Boas’s Mind of Primitive Man”Speaker: R. Darnell, University of Western OntarioAbstract:The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) stands as the primary theoretical manifesto of Boas' anthropology. Reassessment is overdue for at least two reasons: first, the basic point that relational or abstract thought is a universal human capacity has come to be common sense in public as well as anthropological discourse and thus is dismissed as a theoretical position; second, post-war positivism in North America foregrounded descriptive ethnography of a non-mentalist variety and insisted that Boas was a-theoretical. "Mind" was as out of fashion as "primitive" was becoming. The empiricists dismissed Boas' cultural relativism, which came into its own during his anti-racist resistance to Nazi ideology, in favour of material and ecological perspectives that seemed to leav